On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
The rudiments of my interest in photography began during my junior year at a boarding school in Michigan. As always, my best friend was a socially unsuccessful geek, in this case the school photographer. The position wasn’t actually functional, but it gave him sole access to the darkroom, where I would work with him while everyone else was in study hall. I remember printing photos and singing a loud, off-key version of Clementine with him. It was silly, adolescent fun, but it introduced me to the inner world of photography in a way that blossomed later on, at a time when I was at a loss to know what to do with my life.
I spent my senior year at Los Angeles High School, where I offered my services as football photographer. I provided pictures for the school paper without being on their journalism staff, and I gave team members free 8 x 10 prints of themselves in games. Their appreciation went a long way toward giving me a sense of safety during this white boy’s first exposure to integration. It wasn’t until the following year at UCSD that my Republican heritage was washed away forever.
Much of my photographic experience has been covered in previous posts, so I’ll leave the remaining bits of my story to the introductions of individual photos that follow. I’ve selected this group of pictures because for the most part they’re photos I would not submit to On The Road in the normal course of my posting there. My OTR submissions are more of places and things, so for this go-round I’m showing more shots of people.
I invite you to visit my web site, but I warn you that there are far too many pictures there. I apologize for that. I use the site as a repository for all my photos that I can see possibly appearing in some publication, and I’ve given no consideration at all to the needs of potential visitors who might stumble on my work. My overarching goal has been to demonstrate the many techniques and styles I’ve picked up along the way. Visit at your own risk.
In 1965, while at boarding school in Michigan, I borrowed my friend’s Leica and loaded it with a roll of Kodachrome. I had no idea what good photos looked like. I just pointed the camera at things and clicked away. The building in the front of this scene housed staff offices. The big building behind it housed the dining hall, the infirmary, and other functions I no longer remember. The stream in the foreground emptied into Lake Michigan about a hundred yards beyond this point. Cabins were scattered along the beach for boys’ housing, while girls stayed in a dormitory about a mile up the road.
During the summer between high school and college, I got up every day and checked the surf. Any day with waves I spent either body surfing or taking pictures of body surfing. I’d bought myself a Pentax and an off-brand 250mm telephoto lens for my football photography at LA High and used it later for surf photography. This picture of a belly boarder was taken at The Wedge in Newport Beach. I added some effects in Photoshop about ten years ago to harden up the edges and intensify graphic interest. Note that all the foam in the water means that this particular wave was small compared to others that had been coming through.
During my first trip to France, I shot only black and white film. Depth of field in a photograph is affected by a combination of aperture setting – the larger the setting, the narrower the depth of field – and focal length of the lens – longer yielding shorter depth of field. Here I’m shooting with a moderate telephoto, probably 80mm, and a wide aperture. As a result, only a small range is in focus. Anne-Marie’s right eye and the lip of her cup are the only areas in focus as she sips her morning coffee. The effect is to greatly simplify the elements in the frame such that the viewer’s eye is drawn immediately to her eye and the smile in her face.
Immediately following my wedding to Anne-Marie, her aunt and uncle are about to drive to the reception with their niece riding in the back. Everybody is happy. Her uncle is wearing an enormous expression of self-satisfaction – with himself, with his big car, with his position in the family. Only two of Anne-Marie’s many aunts and uncles do not speak Basque as their first language. In my photo the lines of the car provide an orderly frame to highlight the occupants of the car.
At another celebration with Anne-Marie’s family, her great-uncle is about to lift his glass of champagne. While the focus of attention is very much on the hands and the glass, the great-uncle sets the mood of the picture. He was quite a character. I loved every one of Anne-Marie’s relatives.
At Art Center, fashion and portraiture were my weakest subjects. I treated them like still lifes to be faithfully arranged and rendered. My instructors pushed me to ease off on the staging and crispness, but it ran against my natural feelings. This is a photo of my mother’s gardener, a Ukrainian refugee, who sent a print of this picture to his mother back home.
A hippy friend from UCSD, pot in that pipe. This was the period of Richard Avedon’s color solarizations of portraits of the Beatles. My picture was originally a color solarization of a 4 x 5 line negative of a grainy 35mm photograph. This is a Photoshop simulation of that original solarization using the line negative as a starting point.
In my last semester at Art Center, I did three series of photographs for a class called “Experimental Projects.” My favorite series was of an antique tricycle placed on a seamless backdrop and mostly backlit with a studio strobe. Unfortunately, the fact that the school liked it as well, and displayed it in their gallery, meant that in accordance with policy the school retained my prints and negatives. My second favorite of those series was a sequence of nudes, similarly lit from behind with a bare strobe. I selected this shot in part for its appropriateness for a large public site like Balloon Juice. The shapes completely transcend any sense of subject matter, and instead represent a minimalist diagonal flow of light across the frame.
This structure, which sat in front of an abandoned mine overlooking Death Valley, looks almost Japanese. The picture is the only one in this post that truly represents the heart of my artistic sensibilities. I am, after all, a disciple of Brett Weston.
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Wow. These are outstanding, as is your description of how you got them. Thanks for sharing them.
Steve from Mendocino
Anyone needing a link to my website can click here: https://www.stevenjenks.com/
WaterGirl
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): So much talent on Balloon Juice!
J R in WV
Great photos…
Personally, I would have foiled the school by duplicating negatives and prints. Sure, they can have copies, I would keep my originals!
Spanky
Yay! You’re a cat!
stinger
I don’t know much more about photography than “I like this one”. I like all of these, and your explanations help me understand why I like them, making me like them even more! Thanks!
Steve from Mendocino
@Spanky: ROFL
WaterGirl
@Spanky: I love all of these, but I especially love the last one, such a lovely moment communing with the cat, looking at the book together.
WaterGirl
I have a post going up in 5 minutes for so we can talk photos and art in this post and still have a spot for regular conversation, political or otherwise.
JPL
These are amazing, as is your web site. Wow!
CaseyL
I really enjoy hearing people talk about their work, and artists most of all. Thank you for the photos, and your explanations of them. Wonderful work!
Baud
Amazing shots. Beautiful cat.
WaterGirl
I was sure people were going to be asking all sorts of photography questions. Wrong again?
JanieM
These pictures make me want to meet the people in them. The cat, too, of course.
The first shot is so vivid it feels like a memory in my own head, instead of in a picture.
debbie
Beautiful photos, fellow Weston fan! I loved my photography classes, especially puttering around in the darkroom. Digital’s got nothing on it.
Steve from Mendocino
That first picture had a number of issues, color being one of the most pronounced. Everything I did to straighten out the colors created another set of problems. I settled on a deliberate antique effect, which is likely the cause of that sense of memory you’re referring to.
Steve from Mendocino
@debbie: I actually feel tremendously liberated with the dynamic range, the color, and the editing tools of digital. My favorite part of photography was the darkroom. Now, it’s Lightroom/Photoshop.
Ksmiami
@WaterGirl: did you go to Cranbrook or interlocken? I loved living in Bham
WaterGirl
@Ksmiami: I did not. But their summer camps are
famousinfamous.The Castle
I love photographs of people that give me an uncanny sense of their personality, and you have at least a couple of those.
And the shot of the abandoned mine is incredible. Those beautiful beams. I wonder how far those had to travel to end up there.
zhena gogolia
Lovely! I love the one of the gardener. You are a great portraitist, IMO.
suilebhan
Thank you for these wonderful photographs and their stories.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@debbie:
Digital’s less stinky.
Albatrossity
Stunning images and a great story! Thanks for doing this.
Betty
Seeing your development of your art is fascinating. Love all the photos.
Albatrossity
@Steve from Mendocino:
Amen.
HinTN
Late to the party but O.M.F.G. that surf photograph is da bomb. Yeah, the people are well done, especially the champagne glass in focus and the person not (beautiful!!!), but the car is the best. Wonderful work and thanks for sharing
ETA – do people even understand depth of field anymore when the camera knows what you want?
?BillinGlendaleCA
Good work Steve.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@HinTN: Any photographer worth his salt knows depth of field pretty well. Since I do mainly landscapes, it’s not much of an issue, but if I wanted to say photograph something really close in a landscape, I’d probably focus stack.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Albatrossity: I pretty much stayed away from Photoshop my first couple of years after I got my first camera that shoots RAW, but I use it all the time now.
mvr
Thanks for this. Those are good photos.
Lapassionara
Many thanks for posting these. The photographs are lovely. I know the thread is dead, but I am interested in the Basque connection. Can you say more about that?
Steve from Mendocino
@Lapassionara: My ex-wife was born to a Bearnais father and a Basque mother and grew up in Oloron Ste. Marie, on the edge of the Basque province of Soule in France. Her mother had 4 siblings, 3 of whom married Basques. None of Anne-Maries cousins or sister speak Basque. Her maternal grandmother had a stroke late in life and lost her French. Anne-Marie and I used to spend the bulk of our summers in and around the Basque country for the 15 years we were together.
Let me know that you’ve read this so I don’t have to try to remember to catch you at some later point to tell you again.
Thanks for your interest.
jame
My grandmother was Basque. Her father immigrated to south Louisiana in the late 1800s, then went back for the wife and children. She grew up in Vacherie, I think, went to the Normal in north Louisiana, where she met my grandfather.
Ps. You look like Obi-wan in that brown garb. Good cat, too.